Nick SC’s interests

Quotes from: Rick Altman (2005) The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience and Slides, ‘Presenters University’, www.presentersuniversity.com

“…. Reciting your slides: If bad animation is the most inhibitive to connecting with your audience, this one is a close second. This creates any or all of the following impressions: 1) You did not prepare; 2) You are incapable of communicating an original thought; and 3) You have doubts that your audience members are smart enough to be able to read the slide on their own.

These are not exactly the things you meant to convey when you found yourself reciting each bullet, word for word, in front of a room full of people. But the problem is that it’s quite hard to avoid it. When something appears on screen, it’s all-too-easy to treat it like a script. Your mission as you prepare your bullet points is to make it practically impossible to do that.

Let’s say that you are creating a presentation on this very topic. Here are the points you want to make:

Bullets are at their best when they…

· Give the audience more substance than if they are just listening to you

· Help guide the audience through your topics

· Show them the logical progression of your ideas

If you display this verbose slide and then read it aloud, you do nothing to engender confidence with your audience. And you will sound like a drone. So instead, create bullets that do not compel you to commit droneage. What if you displayed this instead:

The three reasons to use bullets:

· 1 + 1 = 3

· I need a map and I need it now!

· Breadcrumbs are an audience’s best friend

These bullets are imaginative, effectively vague, and coy. Moreover, they will not compel you to recite them word for word, although if you did, it wouldn’t be as bad as with the verbose slide, because you would obviously elaborate about each point. With the coy bullets, you have no choice but to turn to the audience and state your case.

And when you’re done stating your case, then you can replace the coy slide with the verbose one (using a nice fade, of course!), so that you give them the visual of your idea. In fact, how bad would it be if, before displaying the verbose slide, you recited it word for word? Not too bad, actually—reciting bullets before they appear is not nearly as bad as doing it afterward. You tell your audience that you have given thought to an effective way to present the idea, you don’t drone, and you don’t risk insult to their intelligence.

Everyone knows that it is not wise to recite bullets aloud, but not as many realize that it’s hard not to. It’s worth the extra effort to create bullets that don’t turn you into a drone.”

Speakers have become presenters and the use of Powerpoint (or other presentation packages) has become the norm. Powerpoint has transformed the way we prepare and lecture in not many years, sometimes for the better, but all too often for the worse. I’m interested in what effects there are and what works and what doesn’t work. Could Powerpoint do for audiences and students in particular what fastfood has done for diet? How do different practices affect pedagogic outcomes? What should we be avoiding?
There’s surprisingly little research on this. Much of the advice comes from business. But the aims of business presentations are not the same as those of education. The advice is rarely founded clearly on rigorous research. So far my research in this area has been largely confined to sources related to business presentations and the advice often fits with my obversations and experience. Having found myself becoming more and more reliant on Powerpoint, but fed-up with so many presentations I decided to see what information was available. Two books have stood out so far; one is Richard Atkinson’s “Lend Me Your Ears” (2004), and Richard E. Mayer’s “Multimedia Learning” (2001) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. The first is an entertaining and powerful book about public speaking in most contexts. It touches on the use of slide presentations but has some good advice on when and how to use slides (see separate page). Richard Mayer is an educational psychologist and appears to be the leading writer and researcher on multimedia learning (advice to follow).

Max Atkinson (2004) ‘Lend me Your Ears’

‘The slide-driven presentation that has become the industry standard model has resulted in a style of presentation that does little to inspire or enthuse audiences. The problem is at its worst when the slides consist of nothing but text or table of numbers. Such heavy reliance on written words and numbers almost guarantees that the presentation will contain far too much information, and be presented in a form of language that is likely to be dull and boring. It also means that the audience’s attention will be divided between trying to listen and read at the same time.“Audiences like to be shown things that help them to understand what the speaker is talking about, so the visual aids most likely to attract positive ratings are ones that are genuinely visual or pictorial, rather than textual or numerical. Visual aids that go down well with audiences:

· Objects, props and demonstrations

· Pictures, ivideo clips [and almost any other graphical item such as maps, charts and charts]

• Non-visual exceptions

· Blank slides i.e. black background [audience switches focus to what is being said]

· Using handouts during a talk”